Martin Geisler wrote:
"Stephen Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
As it stands now, that decision [to make the default install path
"C:\Program Files"] was a marketing decision, because the choice
causes problem with porting programs to Windows which Microsoft
doesn't gather revenue from. I'm sick of that ludicrous misnomer,
"guideline" being applied to a proprietary money-making scheme which
does nothing to benefit the operation of LyX&helpers.
Do you really mean that Microsoft decided on a default install path
with spaces just to annoy all the future Unix-centric programs being
ported to Windows?
That is hard to know - I guess they simply see this as a 'bonus',
they probably weren't smart enough to pull this one of deliberately. :-/
Windows paths with spaces dates back to times when they didn't
worry so much about unix/linux competition.
Their history of planned incompatibility counts against them though,
consider dr-dos . . .
If you download a .bst file from the internet and put it into C:\My
research papers along with research.lyx it doesn't work, not because
of some alleged problem that reflects to C:\My Documents, but for
the same reason C:\program files\texmf doesn't work. It has nothing
to do with retraining.
And I consider both of these problems to be a bug when I encounter
them under Windows. Spaces in paths are a *normal* thing under
Windows, and programs ported to Windows should be able to deal with
them. If not, then I really think the problem lies with the program.
Sure - a space path is normal on windows, and LyX tries
to cope with those too. I think LyX do this quite well, but
LyX does not work alone. It depend on many other programs
to do its work - most notably latex.
[...]
So please don't dismiss this as a WONTFIX bug... lots of people wont
have a Linux-savy boyfriend to help them out with these things :-)
Still, fixing latex is really up to latex developers, not the lyx
developers.
This is a problem some people stumble over for the first time while
using lyx, but only because they didn't use latex until they got lyx.
Lyx is quite nice in that it provides workarounds for some of these space
problems. Some cases are much harder than others, so they may be
"WONTFIX" in lyx - they are left to those who provide latex on windows.
It is so much easier if these bugs are fixed in the proper place - fixing
the problem in latex is better than adding a workaround in lyx, less code
and the fix will benefit non-lyx latex users too. There are mailing
lists for
latex (and various latex distributions) too, try those.
Helge Hafting
